Hello, people who read my words! I'm so glad you're out there...and thanks for the five stars...

It's life, pretty much as normal at the moment, chez Lovering - for which read 'everything is damp, we've run out of cheese, and I can't find my pen'.  But visible signs of Spring are giving me hope that, whilst the cheese situation may well continue, and I probably left my pen in the car, the damp is probably, at some point, going to give way to steam.  Which is nice.

The other day I met someone who actually reads my monthly Yorkshire Post column.  (For those to whom this is news, I write a monthly column in the Yorkshire Post. Oh. Yes, you probably could have taken that information from the sentence, couldn't you. Hmm, sorry.) Here is a sample of the complete twaddle that I talk over there. It's very much the same as the complete twaddle that I talk on here actually, but it tends to have a more...Yorkshire flavour.  Yorkshire flavour is a sort of ..gravy, with a hint of seaside rock and an inexplicable twang of lavender, for some reason.

The taste of Yorkshire.  Sheep not pictured.

 I was a bit taken aback to realise that someone reads what I write.  I mean, I get reviews and things, and a huge number of them are very good, for which I am eternally grateful, but somehow I can never get my head around actual real people reading my books.  And columns, obviously.  Yes, I know people read this blog, sometimes, you know, if they've got nothing better to do and they've just picked up a packet of HobNobs and thought..'ah, yes, Jane likes HobNobs', or if something terrible happens to their fridge and they remember that I am the Queen of Terrible Things Happening to Appliances, and wish to check whether or not the tank in the attic that caused water to pour all over my DD3's bedroom floor, thus making her carpet inexplicably smell of the Cheese We Haven't Got (another long, pointless and boring story which will probably be next week's blog post) ever got mended.

It did.  There.

Anyway.  There I was, wearing pretty much only mud and a hat, being regaled by someone who lives in my village about my Yorkshire Post newspaper column. And all I could think of to say was 'you read it?  You seriously read it?'  I'm a bit like that with the books too.  Whenever someone who isn't either related to me or associated with me in some format or another (ie, will die at my hand if they admit to never having read a word I've written) tells me that they've got one of my books, I adopt a kind of 'recently dead smile' and lose all my words.  What do you say?  I can usually stammer out a 'I hope you enjoyed it' and pray that they don't come back with 'no, not very much, actually'.  Which people, confronted by an author wearing her pants on her head and a wild look in her eye, tend not to do.  Wisely, in my opinion.  And then I look and find that I've got a Five Star Review for Please Don't Stop the Music and a comment of 'best book I've read in ages'!

By the way, if you've never looked at my reviews for some of my books, do go and check them out.  Particularly the one-star ones, which are generally good for a laugh.  I mean, they hurt a bit at the time, but then I just go and read the five star ones, which outnumber the one stars by quite a bit (I could do the percentages but...actually, no, I couldn't. I get a bit wobbly around decimal points too).

So, general upshot of this entire post is - thanks for reading, chaps.